


the everythingness

by bastardoftherealm



Category: Unus Annus - Fandom, Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Happy Ending, M/M, basically unus annus, somewhat current au somewhat divergent, touch starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-18
Updated: 2020-02-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:15:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22780849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastardoftherealm/pseuds/bastardoftherealm
Summary: He was walking deja vu. Mark knew his face before he saw it, knew its topography before he felt it. There was no such thing as soulmates, but there was no other explanation for someone making the hair on your arms stand on end with a single glance the way he did.
Relationships: Mark Fischbach/Ethan Nestor
Comments: 12
Kudos: 302





	the everythingness

“Don’t touch me.”

He regrets the words before they even come out of his mouth. Mark watches a smile falter before it leaps back up, dashing into place on a face he had memorized the second he first saw it. 

If there’s a joke, he doesn’t hear it, because his head is scrambling through all of the layers of regret before it slams itself into repression. Mumbling turns to laughter, and Mark finds himself joining in. He doesn’t know why he does it. And he doesn’t know why he keeps doing it.

Touch was never a thing for him, it hadn’t been for years. 

Though sometimes people fuck you up because they make you feel things you’d forgotten about. 

When they first met, Mark noted that Ethan had a profound everythingness about him. 

If everythingness was even a word that made sense. 

He was walking deja vu. Mark knew his face before he saw it, knew its topography before he felt it. There was no such thing as soulmates, but there was no other explanation for someone making the hair on your arms stand on end with a single glance the way he did.

When the cameras flick off, he can’t stop thinking about it. All of him wants to shout that he never meant it, _any of it_. But it’s odd to ask someone who’s only supposed to be a friend that you want him to touch you. 

Even with as much as he’d dreamt otherwise.

At night he would dream of fingertips. They would never touch him all at once, but there would be fleeting whispers of them against his skin. Brushing over a knuckle, the backs of fingertips gliding up his arm, some playing with the sleeve of his shirt. 

It was their gentle quality that made him squirm. He wanted so badly for them to grip him tightly, and pull his head above the water he’d dunked himself beneath in a cold fever of fear. 

The more he dreamed of the hands, the more he began to realize that there was no agency in the touch. They were as empty of emotion as he had begged himself a long time ago to become. They felt nothing for him by way of emotional entanglement, by way of feelings he himself wasn't able to accept.

The dreams quickly soured after that.

He says it again. It’s an accident, and he doesn’t _mean_ to say it, but the subconscious that’s learned to protect him from things that hurt leaps out last second. It’s out of fear that he does it. He had begun to worry that his fondness had bled through the video screens.

Context has had a habit of getting thrown out the window in his past. Say something you mean, even if you hide it in a joke, and others will find out, eventually.

 _Tighten up those walls. If you do, then no one will know what you’re really thinking_ . _No one can trap you up in that emotion that drives you insane inside._

He stares at the editing window on his computer for hours, rewatching all of the moments where he was so caught up in the everythingness, that it snapped him up like a fly in a honey trap. Places where he let himself sweeten his words enough to be ambiguous. 

Mark rounds up those moments and he places them together in a single video. He saves the video deep in a locked folder, and forces himself to delete the originals.

The only ones left are for him and him alone.

“Are we okay?”

Mark opens an eye, letting out a sigh as he notices Ethan curled into himself on the chair across from him. He’d lay down on the couch to rest his eyes, (and listen to Ethan as he edited, the mumbling, the half singing under breath, the jokes that made no sense but seemed to keep him entertained, the everythingness about him), but he hadn’t heard Ethan on the computer for a few minutes before he heard him speak. 

“I thought we were.” He runs a hand through his hair as he stretches, sitting up slowly. “Do you think there’s something wrong with us?” 

Ethan doesn’t turn his head from the computer, and instead rubs his eyes under his glasses. He shakes his head, as if he’s trying to fling off whatever thoughts he’s having. “Must just be me, man. Must just be tired.” 

His stomach churns, thinking of the videos deep in that computer Ethan sits at now, the moments he’d reminded himself of with guity fondness. Mark nods slowly, turning over. _He knows._

 _He knows and he’s repulsed by it. He felt me pulling away because I was too close. I_ am _too close._

Mark closes his eyes, and lets himself slip deep into the pool of uncomfortable silence. He holds his breath until it drowns him. 

The dreams of fingertips only came fleetingly now. If kind dreams came at all. 

Mark found it hard to sleep. When he did dream, he found himself plunged in an unforgiving ocean. He tried to reach out to whatever lay beyond, to the dim yellow light that pulsed just too far from his fingertips. He could never get quite close enough to save himself.

The water was oily, soured off black paint thrown haphazardly on a canvas, and he was cursed to thrash and drown beneath its depths. The more he drew his hands through it, the more it seemed to stick to his skin, and his hair. It filled his lungs until the lights dimmed to nothing, and the dream woke him, screaming, from sleep. 

He couldn’t remember when he got used to using the joke. It just seemed to happen. The more he got used to it, the more Ethan seemed to pull away.

“ _Can you play more to the camera_ ?” “ _Can you try to add a little more humor?_ ” “ _Once more, with emotion this time_.”

He could feel the emptiness between them growing. Whatever silence permeated, and Mark knew it was his fault. He thought that pulling away was what he needed to do, to try and fix whatever uncomfort he'd sewn in their relationship.

He just had to keep moving, it was the only way to survive. There was no way whatever feelings he was having, if they could even be called that, could exist. 

At night he finds himself sitting in front of his computer, the video on repeat in front of him. _That_ video. 

He holds himself the best he can. _Don’t touch me_ . He thinks. _What sort of idiot lies about something they want so badly_. 

If he cries, he doesn’t remember it. 

He has lunch with his producer. She seems to know him better than he knows himself because he’s getting a lecture before they’ve even ordered drinks.

“What is wrong with you?”

He doesn’t look up from his menu. He knows she’s rolling her eyes without looking at her, arms crossed against her chest. She sighs when he doesn’t answer, and he knows there’s no way out of this as he feels her eyes roll again.

He presses his lips together. “I don’t know how you want me to answer that.”

“The truth might be nice.” 

He lifts an eyebrow. “I thought you could read minds or something.”

“I can’t read _minds_ , but I can read _people_ plenty fine. You two have been acting weird. Weirder than normal.” 

“Me and who,” he turns a page flippantly. 

“You know damn well who.” She sighs again. “Are you even going to look at me? Or are you too stuck in whatever shame spiral you’ve forced yourself into.” 

The menu comes down in a thump against the table. “I’m not in a…”

She lets out a laughing breath through her nose. He looks at her a second too long, and brown eyes framed by a perfect cat’s eye search his. It’s all she needs to understand exactly what he’s thinking. 

Her lips round out into a perfectly small “O” as she nods slowly. “I see.”

It's his turn to roll his eyes. “ _Do you_?”

She makes that face that makes his stomach drop. “Men. Never understand how to talk to one another. Never will.” 

He rubs his fingernail against the ridge on the inside of his thumb. He still doesn’t want to look at her. She’s right, but he’d do anything to keep from admitting it. 

“So.” She rephrases her questioning from before. “What did you do.”

His eyes move up from his hands, across the menu, and finally back to her eyes. “I lied. To him.” The words barely trickle out of his mouth. “And I really, really, didn’t mean it.”

They’re alone, at his place, filming something stupid. Food is strewn across the table, they’re squawking nonsense into a camera, and there’s that feeling again. Of who they used to be.

Then the camera turns off, and it’s right back to where they were before. 

“Hey man, I’m sorry.” 

Ethan lifts his head up from where he’s been fiddling with the camera. “Sorry?” It squeaks out like he’s forcing it past his lips. “For uh, for what?”

“For making it awkward between us.” He shakes his head, before stopping himself by running a hand through his hair. “I’ve been…distant? I think that was the word she used when she knocked it all into perspective.”

A smile twitches before it fades. “You've been a little...distant.” He tips his head to the side like he does in almost every conversation. A gesture that used to make Mark want to try and screw his head on properly, but it was now too familiar for him to ever want it to go away. “I worried a little, too. I knew you’d get through it eventually, but I didn’t want you to suffer through whatever you were going through alone.”

“You’re sweet,” he murmurs. He tests out something small at first. “I don’t mean a lot of what I’m saying...in videos, I mean.” Mark lifts his eyes from the table. “I really hope you know that.”

“I do,” Ethan nods lightly. “But sometimes it feels-”

“Like I’m actually trying to push you away?”

He doesn’t look up at Mark, but he smiles, nodding. “Sometimes it does. And then I worry, and I overthink that I overstepped some boundary or something.” Ethan laughs to himself, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I should’ve just _told_ you, shouldn’t I?”

“There’s a lot we need to tell each other.” 

A pair of blue eyes appear from behind fingertips as they spread out across his face. “Like?” 

He’s flushing red before he can even realize it, and he leans back to check the time, despite his phone sitting on the table right in front of him. “Ehh, y’know. Just like, stuff.” 

Ethan’s hands trail down to the table, and Mark is trying his best to ignore their movements. “Stuff?”

“I don’t know Ethan,” he crosses his arms across his chest to keep them from wandering.

“You don’t know,” Ethan swallows slowly, “or you’re too afraid to say?” 

Mark closes his eyes, letting all of the pain slowly wash over him. He can feel himself shaking, just slightly, and he moves his hands from his chest back to the table. Mark runs his fingertips over the side of a cup sitting in front of him, as if he’s trying to memorize the indentations in the glass. He manages to lift his eyes up from his fingers, where they slowly move to Ethan’s face. Not his eyes, or even the movement of his mouth, but to the side of his face, the curl of hair near his ear. 

He watches the movement of his jaw, until that pair of eyes he knows too well moves themselves to watch him. 

“Mark.” There is again, trapped behind his eyes. _The everythingness, waiting for him, impatiently flickering_.

“Do I even need to say anything?” Mark breaks their eye contact again. “You already know, don’t you.”

“I think you’ve overestimated my abilities to read you.” Ethan shakes his head, forcing a smile. “You’ve been driving me insane with all of this backwards wording, and avoidance, and even when we actually talk, you’re never here.” 

Mark goes still as he feels the warmth of a fingertip on his thumb. He blinks stupidly, staring at nothing, his breathing beginning to flutter in his chest.

“Where do you go? Why do you hide in plain sight?” The fingertip snakes under his open palm, slowly taking his hand. “I’m right here,” his voice is whispered, almost breaking, “you don’t have to hide anymore.”

His chest shudders, and he lets himself, fingers shaking, body aching for a touch he’d forced himself away from for so long. Mark moves his hand, and slides their fingers together.

The two of them sit there like that for a while, and Mark shakes as he wipes away wetness from his face. 

“I never thought that you’d want me...like this.”

The face across from him grins through a tearful expression. “How do you think I felt?”

There's a gratefulness in both of their laughter as Mark feels his fingers grip tighter. A hungry understanding of want versus need versus shame, and the catharsis that comes after it all.

“Thank you.” Mark moves his other hand to wipe away tears. “For letting me...helping me, for whatever this is.” 

“Always.”

That night, he dreams of the ocean for one last time. He drowns alone at the bottom like he has time and time again. 

Then a pair of hands grip him by the back of his shirt, and he finds himself splayed across an empty beach. There’s soft breath on his neck, against his lips. The fingertips grip him tightly, and he lets them.

And he’s no longer afraid. The only words he thinks to speak are the converse of the curse he’d thrown out so long ago. 

Touched by the everythingness, and more.


End file.
